Posts from 7 December 2014

Today was all about authentication. Well, in fairness, we spent the first hour or two finishing up yesterday's work so that we could move on to authentication will all our pieces in place. Further, we dismissed early, so we were short about three hours total to work on this. We didn't finish on Friday, but it was time well spent, and I hope to be able to finish what we started this weekend. After all, the assessment this week is on authentication…

Nevertheless, it was a fruitful day. My partner and I spent a good deal of time sorting out what the phases of the authentication process are, and using a SessionsController we were able to successfully start a session and verify a user's password and all that fun stuff. I know we haven't seen all there is to security, but with CRSF protection and SQL parametrization, and good use of BCrypt, most of the things we need to know about basic security and authentication issues are now part of our toolkit.

It's nice that so much of what we have to work with to get a "good" website are easy. I keep a mental tally of companies that have lost their passwords and had other security breaches, and so all of this is extremely relevant. If we end up working on anything remotely successful, the odds that we'll have a password breach are basically 100% over a long enough timeframe, and doing what we can to protect our users is just good practice.

I'm not sure what else to talk about. The curriculum progression is pretty good—I never really feel like we're doing busywork, nor do I feel like I'm half under water, which says a lot both about the curriculum and the selection process. There are only a couple people in the class that I am ever concerned about; it seems like most of us are absorbing everything as it's thrown at us, which apparently isn't always the case at this kind of program.

I have occasional worries that finding a job will be difficult, because everything we're learning seems… it seems like anyone with sufficient motivation and a little brains could pick all this up. I'm hoping that I'll be able to stand out, and that otherwise good companies have dead weight that they want to replace :) Or something.

Other things - sleep continues to be a challenge. There's always something to do, either at home or having to do with the program, and I feel like I could always be working harder. I'm not falling behind in any way, but I know I could be better. This is especially true when I notice other groups maintaining a faster clip than I've been able to. sigh